Natascha Kampusch was held for eight years in a cellar near Vienna by Wolfgang Priklopil before fleeing from her captor in August 2006. Priklopil snatched Natascha when she was 10-years-old, and forced her to sleep in the small dungeon under his garage. She revealed details of her ordeal after managing to flee when Priklopil was distracted by a phone call as she cleaned his BMW in the garden.

Also in Austria, three girls were revealed to have been imprisoned by their mother in complete darkness for seven years in a house filled with waste and excrement. They played with mice and communicated in their own language in captivity in the home, in a smart upper-middle class suburb in Linz. The girls, Viktoria, Katharina and Elisabeth, were rescued in October 2005, when police broke into the house after a neighbour reported his suspicions.

The disappearance of Shannon Matthews from her school in West Yorkshire, England, in February led to one of the largest search operations in the history of the force, involving more than 300 officers and 60 detectives. The child was found 24 days later, hidden in the base of a divan bed at the home of Michael Donovan, 39, the uncle of Shannon's mother's ex-partner. He has been charged with Shannon's kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment. Karen Matthews, Shannon's mother, was also charged with child neglect and perverting the course of justice, and will stand trial alongside him on November 11. Shannon has been taken into care, and was never reunited with her family.

On May 3, 2007, British three-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared while on holiday with her family in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz, in the Algarve. Her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, launched an international campaign raising more than a million pounds for advertisements and a private detective agency to supplement a Portuguese police inquiry, but Madeleine has not been found.

June Candelario locked her grandson in a portable kennel for 11 hours per day while she went to work. It was three years before authorities in Colorado found out, in 2006. She was convicted on child abuse charges last year.

In September 2004, suspected Chechen rebel leaders seized an entire school full of children in the town of Beslan, Russia. At least 331 people, mostly children, were killed in the subsequent siege.

Sarah Payne, a British schoolgirl aged eight, was was murdered in 2000 after being abducted by car mechanic Roy Whiting. She disappeared from a cornfield close to her grandparents' house in West Sussex where she had been playing. After television appeals by her parents and a nationwide police search, her body was found two and a half weeks after her disappearance, on July 17, in a field 15 miles from where she went missing. Whiting, who was already on the sex offenders' register after previous convictions, was found guilty of her killing after a lengthy police investigation and trial in December 2001.

Sabine Dardenne, 12, was abducted by the Belgian paedophile Marc Dutroux in 1996. She was confined to a cellar and subjected to repeated sexual abuse by her captor until her rescue 80 days later.

Patty Hearst, the American newspaper heiress, was kidnapped in February 1974 aged 19 by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), and later, in an apparent case of Stockholm Syndrome, she joined her captors. In a ransom demand, the SLA demanded Hearst's family distribute $70 million worth of food to every needy Californian. Hearst was eventually imprisoned for two years for taking part in an SLA bank robbery, but the then-president Jimmy Carter commuted the sentence and she was released in 1979. Bill Clinton granted her a full pardon. At her 1976 trial, her attorney claimed she had been imprisoned in a narrow closet, sexually assaulted and blindfolded.

In March 1932, Charles Lindbergh Jr, the 20-month-old son of the world-famous American aviator Charles Lindbergh Snr, was abducted from the family's home in New Jersey. After a search lasting 10 weeks, and ransom negotiations being conducted with kidnappers which drew huge US media coverage, his body was discovered on May 12. Mr Lindbergh Snr, who piloted the first non-stop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris, testified at the murder trial of Bruno Hauptmann, who was found guilty of the abduction and killing.

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